Jane Marley was unaccountably restless.
She sat at needlework, but could not remain at it. A disquiet that was inexplicable kept her on the move throughout the day.
Her daughter had left her precipitately, had gone back to Bath, without a word of explanation as to her purpose, whether to remain there or to return.
Jane could not sound Winefred's heart. She was in doubt whether the girl intended to abandon her and adhere to her father, or whether she proposed to pay her occasional visits. The girl had been reticent towards her regarding Jack Rattenbury. From what she had said, and this was not much, Jane judged that Winefred acknowledged that union with him was not possible, and yet adhered to her resolution not to banish him from her heart. Jane was well aware that the two had met on the downs almost every evening.
The girl was altered in her demeanour towards her mother since the discovery of the appropriation of Captain Rattenbury's hoard. Jane could have bitten out her tongue with mortification at having blurted forth the truth. But in the moment of excessive agitation, under the pang of remorse, of fear lest Jack's life should be sacrificed, she had lost control over her words. Her conscience had cried out in audible tones, and though the words had been few, the accent had sufficed to convey to Winefred the revelation of the fraud committed. And yet, as Jane reasoned with herself, Winefred must have arrived at the truth shortly by another road.
If she got into conversation with her father about the past he was certain to mention to her, in self-exculpation, how that her mother had haughtily, resentfully refused assistance from him; how that from the day that he left her she had not accepted a stiver from him.
When Winefred learned this she would at once ask, whence then came the money that had enabled her mother to purchase the Undercliff, and to send her to be educated in a private family of some pretensions?
And Winefred was not one to leave such a question unanswered. She would work at it till she had arrived at a satisfactory explanation. When the girl discovered that no money had been transmitted to her mother from Mr. Holwood, her mind would at once fasten on the rumours that circulated relative to what her mother had done. She could come to no other possible conclusion save that there was some good ground for the suspicion so generally entertained.
That Winefred did resent such an appropriation of the savings of a dead man Jane could understand, but not why she did not accept those excuses for it with which Jane salved her own conscience. The fable about the murder of her brother at the instigation of Job Rattenbury, and that of her father having been defrauded of his legitimate gains by the same man, she had accepted as certain truths, and clung to them as such with tenacity.